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Calories in, calories out.
For years I believed that the only reason people got fat was because they ate more than they burned and ended up with an excess of energy. It was also the view pushed by the medical profession, by health education at school, and by society in general. I spent years trying to get my weight under control by eating less and moving more.
After a particularly strict period of literally weighing the margarine container before and after buttering toast so I knew how many calories of margarine I used I had gained weight rather than losing even with a 500kcal deficit. I listened to a podcast (Skeptics with a K) in which they interviewed Gary Taubes about the non-caloric hormonal model of obesity. It basically said that if your insulin level was up you couldn't access body fat, so all the thoughts of that fat being available were flawed and you couldn't really lose weight in that state. What ended up happening was a reduction in calorie burn and loss of muscle. Fixing the insulin is the first step to managing weight and if you do that you can access your body fat for energy.
It took another year before I actually tried keto and I lost 20kg in the first two months and another 10kg over the next few. It was a massive change but I didn't sustain it given the environment I was in and ended up gaining a fair bit of the weight back (though not all).
Years later (over a decade, oh no, so old) and I have a much more comfortable body fat percentage and lots more muscle. I carry only a little more than I want and honestly it is too much effort to get down that last little bit, but I feel better now in my late 30s than I did in my early 20s in terms of movement, energy, and cognition. When i get injured I recover quickly, and when I get sick it is usually very short and then over. I used to get sick for weeks at a time and many times per year, now I have only been sick twice this year and both times in December (filthy children, gross but fun).
If you had asked me in 2010 how to manage weight I would have told you, nose firmly in the air, to eat less and move more. So glad to have been wrong.
While it is more complex, regarding how brains and other metabolic systems signal and process desire to eat etc., it IS calories in / calories out, I believe. If one eats a 500 calorie deficit, they will lose weight. It borders on impossible for some for completely understandable and forgivable reasons, but I’m sorry to say, I suspect you accounting of either calories in or calories out was mistaken.
Yes, there are differences in bioavailability across foods and people but still carbon goes in, breaks off, and is mostly breathed out.
To anybody that downvotes this, I challenge you to suggest what chemical atoms are you adding to your weight when you gain even while eating at a calorie deficit. Don’t mistake me for saying insulin and such don’t play a huge role; they do. But the role they play is in the delicate balance of calories in and out. So, too, does one’s microbiome, which weighs more than one’s brain; so who is doing the thinking. Complex processes that all affect calories in and out.
How dare you call out people for their bias. Lol
This assumes a whole bunch of things. First, do you actually absorb all of the calories through your gut? Does your body maintain the same base rate of expenditure (BMR) in both the short and long term of restriction?
When you look at people who did The Biggest Loser they did the exact thing you are talking about. They had a significant caloric deficit through eating restricting and massive amounts of exercise. In the short term they did lose weight but it also ruined their BMR. Years later they had mostly put the weight back on and had a lower BMR than at the start. It damaged them.
If you lose weight through caloric deficit you may not notice any change but your body will stop prioritising things like your hair and skin, muscle growth, and bone maintenance. All of those are low priority for an organism in caloric deficit. Instead your body will focus on the most important thing, getting more food. You become food obsessed, thinking about it all day, and you will eat almost anything you can access. You also end up with a lower body temperature, less immune activity, and lower drive for exercise and sex. It is an absolute nightmare.
The end result is that calories in calories out assumes a perfect and simple system. It does not take into account things like proton uncoupling in brown fat, differing levels of absorption through digestion, body temperature, hair growth, cell turnover, and tonnes of other things. It can appear to work for a short time but long term it breaks down and deviates more and more from the data.
I mean, calories in/out is real, you can't get fat if you're eating less than what you're spending. On the other hand you definitely can thin up eating more calories than you spend by for example going into ketosis where calories don't matter all that much.
All of that being said, calories in/out is not the whole picture, like you mentioned there are plenty of other stuff that might make it so that two people eating the same and exercising the same amount get drastically opposite results. At the end of the day our bodies have a calorie budget they're trying to stick to, eating less (or actually eating better) is the solution, exercising helps but not in increasing your calorie budget, only in directing your budget to be more healthy.
People are just very judgemental when it comes to weight. I think a lot of people like to believe that it all comes down to self-control, which is not the case. That can be very harmful. People are blamed for their own medical situations. Their self esteem is harmed and they are made to suffer through years and years of diets making the situation worse without getting the appropriate (medical) help they need.
We also judge people by their face all the time, and there is nothing they can do to change it.
And because of our animal side, we value beauty higher than almost anything else, which makes us stupid and easily manipulated.
I agree. That happens too. But I think the process of judging people by their face is largely an implicit and unconscious one. I do not think that many people will actually claim that they believe that you can decide whether someone is a bad person by e.g., the shape of their chin. (Although you always will have exceptions.) This makes it very hard to change.
Many people will claim that overweight is just the result of a lack of self control. This is something they believe explicitly and consciously. It is possible to change that believe and it should change as it is incorrect.
Even if it would be lack of self control, I dont see why people get to judge that person for it. The old saying that you need to walk in someones shoes to truly understand them is very true...
Why not support people who struggle instead of tearing them down? Specially now when we live in a society and a person being fat is no downside to the group. I can see how it could be an issue if you are a group in the forest and you have to walk long distances and the fat person slows everyone down and it endangers the group. But we dont have that situation today at all. So why not lift them up and help?
I agree with that. There is no reason to not just accept overweight people like anyone else.
Calories in / calories out works perfectly and predictably for fat loss as long as you're measuring correctly and most people don't. I used to follow it religiously in the run up to fights in order to make weight.
I would look at my weight, look at the weight I need to be 8 weeks later, figure the calorie hole I needed and follow it incredibly closely.
It worked every single time without fail. I always stepped into the ring lean as fuck and having lost zero muscle because I was training twice a day six days a week and keeping protein intake high. I allowed one maintenance calorie day per week on my recovery day.
There are other things that account for weight loss (e.g. loss of sugar from muscles and the associated water loss that comes with that) if you're using keto but most people are after fat loss more than weight loss.